Not MBTI directly but stuff they’ve build upon the meyers brings and DISC profiling lines of thought. They’re pretty common in any enterprise organisation here, typically in some form that any given HR department has developed themselves in partnership with some consultant agency for lots and lots of money.

It’s given to anyone heading for a management related position. As I advice top management on tech decision I always end up taking them when getting hired or reorganised. I do tell the truth on them of course, but it’s a bunch of black magic as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even think it’s a nice tool for talking because it’s often either/or results when everyone is really a tad of everything.

But yes, they are very common.

Question, are you permitted to view your own results? My company conducts a similar series of assessments for all roles; and as a hiring manager I am able to see how applicants score across a battery of indicators from agreeableness, deferential nature, leadership ability, along with how individuals do in raw aptitude testing.

Became curious one day and asked HR if I could view my scores and was told no. Furrowed my brow a bit at that one.

I furrow it even more knowing the company doesn't expect hiring managers to actually use these scores with any meaningful weight, nor does recruiting actually rely on them during the screening process-or so I was told when asked-they merely ship them direct to the decision maker, forcing me to wonder why we put candidates through them to begin with.

Certainly the common refrain is that giving candidates their results could open companies up to liability if they pass on a candidate, which causes a further reaction on my part "all the more reason to do away with them and find another means of assessing talent. Maybe this is a process that doesn't require the reduction of humans to a few data points and indicators n a scoreboard for the privilege of a friendly career conversation".

Well yes, part of it is that you talk through the results with the HR consultant and hiring manager, so you can talk about whether you agree with the results or how they see them and such.

Interesting.

I’m on an ethics committee with my employer, while it tends to focus on how our product behaves ethically I’m going to be making a push to focus a few things inward, and I plan to start with this.

Frankly it’s of my opinion if you’re going to assess someone using this type of technology and use it in any means to make a determination of hiring, that candidate is owed their results.

Thanks for sharing your experiences here.

Anecdotally, McKinsey and other consulting people are/were pretty obsessed with it. At least those are the only ones I ever heard using it in a normal human conversation. At first I was terribly confused talking to people referring to themselves and others with what sounded like bad passwords. But it fits the general cult like behavior.

It sounds just enough like science for people to pay a lot of money for it, but not enough like science that it scares anyone. Of course, it's pretty much bullshit for many reasons.

Scientifically valid personality tests are illegal for HR to use outside of exceptional roles in specific industries. These Meyers-Briggs-like tests are pseudoscientific silliness.

Many moons ago I was in a graduate program at a large multinational industry company. Closer to the end of the graduate program they had all the graduates do the Myers-Briggs Test at a multi-day company retreat event.

It was painted as a 'self-discovery' exercise but the exercise was organized by HR and it clearly felt like they were pre-screening for which graduates to put on a 'upper management' track.

We have something similar. They use these for some of the leadership 'culture' sessions - but the emphasis is more around the differences in people and how one style of communication is more effective with one group and backfire with others. I was super skeptical initially, but there were some interesting insights that came out of it.